Listen
by Uozumi
Summary: One day he realized he was in love with her, but she was taken. So now, he waits.


**Fandom** Star Trek AOS  
**Character(s)/Pairing(s)** Scotty, Uhura, Spock; Scotty/Uhura (one-sided), Spock/Uhura, Kirk/Spock (implied)  
**Genre** Friendship/Romance (kind of)  
**Rating** PG  
**Word Count** 1725  
**Disclaimer** Star Trek c. Paramount, CBS, NBC, Roddenberry.  
**Summary** One day he realized he was in love with her, but she was taken. So now, he waits.  
**Warning(s)** None  
**Notes** Originally this was going to be a drabble based on the very end scene, but it just grew into so much more when I asked myself, "Why would Scotty listen?"

_**Listen**_

It wasn't love at first sight. He knew when he met her, but the memory was foggy now, full of people and excitement on the bridge of the Enterprise. If anything he remembered the cold most of all since he was the makings of a drowned rat. Embarrassing, yes, but the truth all the same. The next several times they encountered each other blurred together into routine days and a budding friendship over mealtimes and officer meetings until the day they were sitting at lunch several months into the first five-year mission. He looked at her over his turkey salad on rye and all she was doing was stirring her potato soup, but he knew. He almost didn't notice his tomato fall out of his sandwich. It didn't matter, because he was in love with this woman, and she was in love with the Vulcan sitting on her left at the time. Spock was a good guy, as far as Vulcans could be, and somehow Scotty couldn't muster up jealousy over the whole sad situation. He just placed his tomato back into his sandwich and continued eating.

That was then and this was now and a whole year after he realized he loved Nyota Uhura. Of course, at first, he wrote it off as a crush, but it wasn't vapid enough. The more time they spent together, the more he became entrenched under her magnetism. She was charming, intelligent, and honest. Her pride wasn't so large she couldn't admit to fear, but her fear wasn't so strong that she gave into it. When he tried to avoid her to silence his crush, she sought him out.

"He didn't really mean that."

Scotty almost dropped his hypersonic screwdriver at her voice. He was deep in the bowels of engineering doing some low level maintenance before it became a bigger problem.

"Sorry." She knelt down carefully and handed him the tool. "I thought you saw me."

"I saw some boots," he took the tool, "but I didn't realize it was you." He rolled out from under the low hanging equipment he had been working on and wiped the sweat from his brow. Scotty put the hypersonic screwdriver back in the tool kit strapped to a nearby post. "What brings you down here?"

"Kirk. Who else?" She leaned against another post and folded her arms. "He always says stupid stuff when he gets excited about something, you shouldn't let it get to you."

Scotty tilted his head. He couldn't even remember what exchange she must be talking about, but that didn't matter because apparently she didn't know he was down here so he wouldn't have supper with her in the officer's mess and then keep fueling this whatever it was getting to be. He wasn't even sure it was a crush anymore.

"Well, he can't just go off on you like that." Uhura moved her head so her ponytail moved off her shoulder. "Sometimes I think he gets a kick out of needling my friends as much as he gets a kick out of needling at me."

"He'll calm down once we're back to doing something exciting," Scotty offered and double checked he wasn't leaving any tools in improper places or anything open that should be closed. There might be a beautiful lady talking to him, but there was another beautiful lady relying on him to keep her running smoothly. Once he was certain everything was checked out, he almost offered her his arm, but remembered she was taken at the last moment and ran a hand through his hair instead. "You hungry?"

"Starving." She stopped leaning on the wall. They headed towards the officers mess and Scotty knew he should feel guilty for drawing her here, but it wasn't as if Spock was off shift right now to eat with her anyway. Scotty decided it would be wrong to deny her his friendship.

If Scotty wasn't in his cabin or in Engineering, he could be found in one of the recreation rooms on the ship. Sometimes in a group, sometimes alone. Tonight it was late enough that had Scotty been in his cabin, the lights would have been dimmed to a moonlit night quality. His stride stopped short when he saw the only other person in the recreation room.

"You don't have to stop because I'm here," Scotty stated when Uhura abruptly cut off the song she was playing on the only recreational piano in the entire ship. There were four more situated throughout the ship, but they were all in private quarters.

Uhura's fingers flexed on the keys. They piano and seat were bolted firmly into the floor incase gravity would ever cut out on the deck. She shook her head. Her shoulders were set squarely with a determination, but her fingers were languid and didn't seem to want to listen to the rest of her posture.

"I can go if – "

"No, it's all right. You can stay."

Scotty walked over so they didn't have an awkwardly large distance between them. "What brings you in here at this hour?" It was the first time he'd seen her in the recreation room when she should be sleeping at a time not connected to some tragic on shore happening.

Uhura resumed playing, using the music to relax her posture, to bring harmony between her troubled fingers and stubborn shoulders. "We're taking a break from each other." She didn't have to elaborate for Scotty to know she meant Spock and herself.

Scotty leaned against the piano, his arms folded over the closed lid. "Ah. I'm sorry."

"It will be all right," Uhura stated and Scotty believed her.

A few weeks later, all hell seemed to break lose upon the Enterprise. There was warning. Spock seemed to be regressing from thirty to fifteen within the span of one week. What had been "taking a break" became "broke it off" somewhere in that time span as well. Now three weeks into Spock losing all his marbles, the Enterprise seemed to be doing some sort of dance mimicking a bee leading its brethren to a flower.

"Captain, I've got to advise you stick to a course," Scotty told Kirk in confidence over a message sent from his console to Kirk's console so the others in the bridge and those at Engineering couldn't hear Scotty advise the captain in such a manner.

"Tell that to Spock," was Kirk's reply.

Now why Spock would be dictating the path of the Enterprise was beyond Scotty but the computer, which was already having problems before the course correction frenzy, was threatening to overload and go offline if it received corrections too quickly. Scotty still couldn't figure it out when he sat down with Uhura over lunch. She was unusually quiet, but she was eating her pasta normally enough. Scotty poked about his ham. It was looking sketchy like a bad rehydration job. He started to eat it anyway. "We're changing course so much the computers are playing pong," he commented. Of course, pong was something only a select subset of Starfleet knew about. It was very ancient and very simple, but some students after they programmed the game for a computers course continued to play it even after they were well beyond that level of programming.

"Pong?" Uhura looked up at him.

"Ah computer game, send a dot around the screen with blocks," Scotty summarized. "It's something to do in lit lecture." That got her to talking and their lunch ended on a more normal note.

The rest of the week was not so normal. Eventually the ship laid in a course for the Vulcan colony. There was a rumor going around Engineering that Spock was dying. Scotty was too busy keeping the computers together to really listen and rumors were rumors. Besides, if Spock really were dying, he wouldn't have seen McCoy at the officer's mess because the doctor would be too busy stopping Spock from dying to remember to eat.

When they arrived at Vulcan colony, Scotty was unaware of the drama happening on the planet's surface. He took his time recalibrating the computers and fixing the ship wide system. Scotty didn't know what time it was when he smelled the food heading towards him, but his stomach rumbled in anticipation. Like many on this ship, he could get so wrapped up in his work that eating became an afterthought.

"You're a lifesaver," he greeted Uhura. She set a tray down out of the way of the equipment and he went about making sure things wouldn't go to pieces before walking over to her. They talked about things that happened throughout the time they were doing their duty. Eventually the conversation steered to orbiting the colony. "So the three of them went down there?"

Uhura nodded, the laughter from an earlier account of one of the yeomen and a stray cat gone from her features. "They came back a few hours ago." She leaned against the table the now empty tray sat upon. Scotty waited. Something bad must have happened if Uhura looked so drained. Scotty watched her and in her own time, she added, "Spock chose _him_." Uhura's eyes moved from the floor up to meet Scotty's. "They were on that colony and Spock was forced to 'kill' Kirk and then I guess later Spock figured out that what he was looking for…" her voice trailed off. She looked somewhere between flabbergasted and angry, somewhere between confused and betrayed. "After everything Kirk has done to him, Spock chose him when he got back to the ship."

Scotty didn't know what to say. Death just had a way of bringing out things and feelings no one wanted to deal with. If he understood what Uhura was telling him, it probably wasn't something Spock had planned to do. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. "I don't think he wants to hurt you, but that doesn't mean it won't hurt."

Uhura slumped her posture just a little at the comforting touch. "I know. I know." She shook her head. "But it feels so…" She couldn't find the words for it.

Scotty nodded and let her take her time sorting through things. He could wait and he could listen because he loved her, and maybe in time, he would tell her.

**The End**


End file.
